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Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Ken Grossman on the Second Anniversary Beer

Note: Post has been updated; I've added another video.

Yesterday, Sierra Nevada founder Ken Grossman made a couple of stops in Portland, and I caught him when he appeared at Steinbart's. Fred Eckhardt was supposed to appear jointly, but he arrived late and, in gracious humble form, sat at the back of the crowd. (Angelo caught the later appearance at the Horse Brass and filmed it.) I cut together some video of his comments about the beer he, Charlie Papazian, and Fred jointly conceived for the second of the Sierra Nevada 30-year anniversary beers.

I apologize for the quality--it was filmed in the warehouse, and Ken was standing about a foot underneath a fluorescent light. The bay door was open, and you can hear cars driving along rainy roads in the background. Still, I think you'll find it interesting.

I shot about 45 minutes of tape, and Ken spoke on some pretty fascinating topics. Do you guys have any interest in further footage? I thought I'd put up one more where he talks about the next anniversary beer--but I also have footage of him talking engagingly about technical aspects of brewing, like: how to leach iron from kegs before using them; how quickly beer degrades in the bottle and which seals are most effective; how the SN torpedo works; history of Sierra Nevada; discussion of issues around distribution; and more random stuff.

Finally, I want to highlight an extremely cool thing the brewery is doing this year: Beer Camp. Twenty lucky participants will go down to the brewery, spend two days crafting and brewing a beer which will then be released in their home regions once it's ready. Someone from Portland absolutely needs to be in that group of 20. So go and enter.

Update: Here's the video about the third anniversary beer Sierra Nevada brewed with New Albion founder Jack McAuliffe. Call this the "Old Toe-sucker" clip.

At the end of your first Ken snippet, he mentions developing the recipe in 10-bbl test batches. After that they would then brew a 100-bbl batch and tweak that for the final recipe.Pray tell, what happened to that 90+ barrels of Sierra Nevada Anniversary Brew?